Bay State Marathon Traffic

Did anyone else get stuck in this? I left home around noon time to grab a coffee in Drum Hill (Chelmsford), fully aware there was a marathon going on today. However, this wasn't like most of the marathons I see happening along the boulevard and in Lowell. Starting from the Aiken St bridge, going towards Nashua along the VFW Highway, they closed all the bridges going into Lowell (and Chelmsford). They allowed traffic out of Lowell and onto VFW Highway, but not in the other direction. So I decided to drive all the way towards Nashua, hop on RT3 and get off the exit for Chelmsford. As I neared the RT113 bridge in Tyngsborough, the noticed the traffic was backed up for two miles. And knowing how messed up the lights at that intersection are, there was no way I was going to wait in that traffic. So I turned around, went all the way back through the traffic I had already been through, took a couple of back roads to avoid some of it, went past my house, then took the bridge into downtown Lowell. There was some traffic that way too, but it wasn't nearly as bad.

I basically spent 1 hour in traffic, in Lowell. There should have been signs, several days prior to the marathon, which announced which bridges would be closed to traffic. Instead, the signs simply said "Expect Significant Delays". That isn't very helpful if they don't inform you how to avoid the "significant delays"!